Happy Self-Surrender and Unhappy Self-Assertion
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Happy Self-Surrender and Unhappy Self-Assertion: A Comparison between Admiration and Emulative Envy [Penultimate version of an essay forthcoming in The Moral Psychology of Admiration, ed. by Alfred Archer and André Grahle, Rowman and Littlefield International. Please cite the final version.] “Envy is concealed admiration. An admirer who feels that he cannot be happy by surrendering himself elects to become envious of that which he admires. So he speaks another language, and in that language of his the thing which he really admires is called a stupid, insipid, and queer sort of thing. Admiration is happy self-surrender; envy is unhappy self-assertion.” (Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death) You did it! You won first prize. You just heard the speaker announce your name. You can’t quite believe it. All the sleepless nights, all the work, all the fights with your partner and the yelling at the kids, followed by repentance, making amends, and explaining you are just so very tired, and you will do better next time. You tell yourself it was all worth it. You open your eyes, realizing only now that you closed them for a second, and you look around. Everyone is waiting for you to stand up and go to the podium. You can’t help but look in the eyes of the people near you: they were all competing with you, and their hopes have just been dashed by your victory. What would you expect to see in their gaze? And what would you rather see? Admiration or envy? Most people will say that they would rather be admired than envied, even though we often expect, and fear, to be envied. It’s because you fear to be envied that when you give your little speech at the podium you start by collecting good will and thanking all of the people in front of you; it’s because you fear to be envied and to avoid sounding boastful that you highlight your lack of desert and your good fortune, even though you actually believe you achieved success through your 1 hard work. All socially apt adults know this much: even if you sincerely believe you are better than everyone else, you just don’t say it out loud.1 Conversely, imagine that you are one of the people who have not won the prize. What would you rather feel? And what should you show that you are feeling, on the outside? Envy or admiration? The answer here will be, I suspect, universal: admiration. No matter what you actually feel inwardly, consciously or unconsciously, you will clap your hands and put up a congratulatory smile on your face. Again, very few socially apt adults will stomp their feet and make a frowning face, and storm out of the ballroom, no matter how envious they are feeling. None of the phenomena I described are surprising. Most people think of admiration as a positive emotion, both affectively and morally: it is pleasant to feel; it inspires the admirer; it is void of ill will and thus does not threaten the admired, who does not fear being deprived of their superior status or harmed in any way. Conversely, most people think of envy as a negative emotion, almost a perfect opposite of admiration: it is unpleasant to feel; it depresses the envier; it is malicious and thus scares the envied, who fears the envier’s attempts to spoil the good they covet. And yet, innumerable stores and products contain the word “envy” in their name, and any psychologist working in marketing or advertisement will tell you that many ads are aimed to elicit envy in the viewers. We do, secretly, want others to envy us. And we do, often, envy others. This gap between the story that emerges to the surface and the story buried in our hearts is not merely the chasm between ideal and reality, a chasm we so often confront when philosophizing about ethics. It is also an expression of the complexity of human moral psychology, a symptom of the variety and nuance of social-comparison emotions. 1 This is a social behavior that we are taught early on in life. For most of us, a certain kind of modesty, whether sincere or not, becomes automatic and intuitive, an internalized norm of etiquette. Some adult individuals flout the norm, either because of a disability or neural atypicality, or because they can afford to do so given their social position and power. However, there are significant cultural variations in what counts as “modesty”. While these behaviors can be observed cross-culturally, here I focus on contemporary Western society. 2 In this essay, I argue that a certain kind of envy is not only morally permissible, but also, sometimes, more fitting and productive than admiration. Envy and admiration are part of our emotional palette, our toolbox of evolutionary adaptations, and they play complementary roles. I start by introducing my original taxonomy of envy, which allows me to introduce emulative envy, a species of envy sometimes confused with admiration. After reviewing how the two emotions differ from a psychological perspective, I focus in particular on the distinct and complementary roles they play in the ethical and political domains. 1. The Varieties of Envy Philosophers are used to lively ontological debates, but even psychologists seem far from a consensus on the thorny question of what emotions are. In both disciplines, emotions are argued to be feelings, judgments, perceptions, cultural constructs, innate responses, all of the above or even none of the above, given the recent popularity of psychological construction theories, according to which emotions are not discrete natural kinds.2 This ontological debate, however, has no direct bearing on the question I am tackling in this paper, so I will use a relatively neutral definition of emotion as a syndrome of characteristic appraisals, feelings and physiological changes (including facial expressions), motivational tendencies and behavioral outputs. Fear, for instance, can thus be individuated by its appraisal that a certain object is scary (because dangerous or harmful); by affective responses caused by specific bodily changes (e. g. increase in heart rate and blood pressure, accelerated breathing, release of stress hormones); and by the typical urge to flee or fight. Fear, like many emotions that have traditionally been called “basic”, involves a two-place relation: the agent who experiences the emotion and the object that triggers it. 2 See Scarantino and de Sousa 2018 for a review. 3 Envy is more complex, and so there is disagreement on whether it is better characterized as a two or three-place relation. I assume here the view that I defend elsewhere (Protasi 2016, 2017b): that it is a three-place relation, composed of the envier (the subject who feels the emotion), the envied (the person toward whom the emotion is directed, or target), and the good (the object with regard to which the envier is in a disadvantageous position vis-à-vis the envied).3 But what is envy about? Envy’s appraisal, or evaluative content, has to do with perceived superiority or advantage: the envied has something that the envier lacks and that they care about. As a consequence, envy’s affect is negative: it is a painful or at least unpleasant emotion to feel. Such a pain is amplified by a further aspect of envy. In cognitivist terms, envy’s appraisal involves a perception of similarity: that is, the envied is perceived as similar to the envier along some relevant dimension. (Note that envy’s appraisal may not be conscious—in fact, envy itself often isn’t (Smith and Kim 2007: 56).) In a noncognitivist account, perceived similarity may be considered a situational antecedent or part of the fittingness conditions. Envy feels a lot worse than simple wish for something or a general feeling of inferiority to another person: it compounds the two. The insult of feeling inadequate is added to the injury of lacking a valued good, so to speak. In addition, envy is never felt with regard to goods that are considered important, but not connected to the envier’s identity. This aspect, too, may or may not be part of envy’s appraisal depending on the account of emotions one chooses. My working definition of envy will thus be: aversive response to a perceived disadvantage vis-à-vis a similar other with regard to a domain of self-relevance, which motivates the agent to overcome their disadvantage either by pushing themselves up to the envied person’s position or by pulling the envied down to theirs. 3 For a fuller explanation and defense of my account of envy, see Protasi (2016). Therein, I also provide extensive references to the empirical literature supporting my descriptive claims. 4 Such a disjunctive motivational tendency (which we can informally call “leveling up” or “leveling down”) gives rise to a variety of behavioral outputs, which in turn characterize four specific varieties of envy. In order to see how that works, though, we have to take a step back and look more carefully at envy’s appraisal. Recall my initial scene and adapt it to your professional context. The prize winner is a colleague of yours. They have achieved a significant professional milestone, while you haven’t. This perceived inferiority of yours is painful. But it might be painful in two different ways: it might sting because you really care about that goal. Or it might sting because… it is that colleague who has achieved it. That is, you might be primarily concerned with the lack of the good, or you might be primarily concerned with the superiority of the envied.